What’s The Buzz?

Nothing says “here comes summer” like the friendly buzzy purring of a big, cheer ful bumblebee lightly bopping the conser vator y window, or seeing honey bees lapping up flower nectar as they dance from bloom to bloom.

Our fuzzy garden friends are regulars on the lawn, but do you know just how impor tant they are to our gardens – and our crops?

While these little whirring superheroes are going about their daily business they are transferring some allimpor tant little grains from flower to flower and so helping with pollinating the plants.

It isn’t just the flowers in gardens! An incredible one-third of our food is pollination-dependent and bees cer tainly punch above their weight when it comes to playing their par t – and that goes for the crops that livestock feed on too.

Just think how much of your vegetable patch or berry bushes have flowering plants. All of them need the pollen grains of the female (stigma) and male

(anther) par ts of the plant to be transferred to others. Fer tile seeds then find their way to the soil and the whole cycle star ts all over again.

Our friendly little pollinators work hard and can fly up to four miles in a day, getting 2,000 blooms under their furry belts as they work. They buzz along at around 15mph, flapping their wings at up to 230 times per second!